How appropriate that an outfit called Icon Books should publish Charlotte Rampling’s WHO I AM.

Rampling is an undeniable icon of film and popular culture, and her book, co authored by Christophe Bataille, is sure to achieve iconic cache.

The first thing to say about WHO I AM is what it is not.

In the first paragraph, Rampling says, with a laugh, One thing it definitely can’t be is a biography. I’ve tried telling my life story. It doesn’t work…..I don’t open up.

However, we are assured that everything is true….or rather, everything has happened.

WHO I AM is not a kiss and tell Hollywood expose, but an enigmatic, idiosyncratic meditation on remembering, mostly childhood, adolescence and pre fame, and about the secrets that keep us human, secrets designed to protect, but that can turn septic.

The spirit of her sister, Sarah, haunts the book, the spectre of her suicide in South America, kept secret for years, finally gave cause for pause in Charlotte’s career.

“The laughter and the tears become indistinguishable. We lock them away. For the Ramplings, the heart is a safe. Kept by generations, the family secret becomes a legend. We only know how to keep silent.”

Nevertheless, we learn a great deal about Charley’s parents. (Until her twenties she was called Charley by her parents, sister and friends.) Her father Godfrey was a gold Olympian, Officer, Gentleman and centenarian. Her mother, Isabel, was a great romantic who kept diaries penned in purple ink.

An escape from her history in film, which tells its own story anyway, WHO I AM is a portrait painted by the poetry of childhood, which could have become mired in melancholy, but rather creates an aura of silent beauty that never ceases to intrigue, ‘a sense of ghost.’

Augmented with photographs from the Rampling family album, WHO I AM is full of the mystery, myth and magic of childhood from a woman who has a stubborn refusal to be tamed.

WHO I AM by Charlotte Rampling with Christophe Bataille, translated by William Hobson, is published by Icon Books.

http://www.booktopia.com.au/who-i-am-charlotte-rampling/prod9781785781933.html